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Between session splat
The week following the assault on the Gatehouse goes quickly. Most of you spend the time helping out clearing and repairing the wall in some fashion or another, or otherwise participate in other more menial soldier duties like guarding or patrolling. The majority of the troops treat you fairly coldly. Although Tumiko treats you fairly well, the Orcs from the Iron Hand are somewhat resentful of you. They seem to consider you to be glory hogs. They were expecting a battle and feel like you denied it to them. The other auxiliary troops like yourselves are similarly cool in their attitude towards you. They were, for the most part, quite content being second string troops, but now you've raised the bar. Discipline is too high to allow for any sorts of 'accidents', instead, it is expressed more in the way the other troops exclude you from drinks and wrestling, and the way a room goes quiet when you enter. The archers nests are repaired and new archer slits are installed facing the city. You spend some of your time up there, either on guard duty, or simply looking out during your free time. Although at first glance the smashed city looks desolate, with a bit of patience, you realise this isn't the case. Indeed, the city seems to have a pulse of its own, with its own day-night cycle. Day time is pretty quiet. The occasional gargoyle or harpy can be seen circling high above, on the search for prey. Maybe once or twice a day, you can see one dart down, sometimes carrying away the fresh corpse of a small or medium humanoid. Every so often you can see bands of people dart from cover to cover. Its hard to make out much from a distance, but while they seem heavily armoured they're still very cautious. At night, the city seems to come alive a bit more. Occasionally you can see bat wings silhouetted against the night sky, with common wisdom suggesting that they're either demons or devils. With their superior night vision nothing else dares to take to the skies. You can't really tell what they're up to in the darkness, only that they're there On the ground, you think there is a bit more activity than during the day. The mostly flattened city does little to muffle the sounds of the occasional scream, the clash of metal on metal, or the sound of collapsing rubble. Either the inhabitants are mostly nocturnal, or simply trying to use the darkness as cover, you aren't sure which. As the week passes however, the sounds from the city get a tiny bit louder and more frequent. Noone is willing to put their hand up and swear to it, but most people, including yourselves, hold that opinion. The going theory is that the assault on the gatehouse disturbed the city's usual rhythm, and it is gradually returning to 'normal' as time passes. Very rarely, the zombies beneath the wall stir. If something disturbs them, they stand up and lumber a short distance in that direction, groaning loudly. They always return though, collapsing once again in roughly the same spread you originally found them in, fanned out around the gatehouse, running down both halves of the wall. Noone ever mentions the Warsworn.